· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The first time I killed a calamity, I learned a simple truth.
Monsters do not "break."
They change.
The Leviathan had done it too. It had stopped thrashing and started thinking. The sea had turned from a battlefield into a trap designed to drown you with patience. We won because we knew that patience could be answered with preparation.
The One Eyed Black Dragon did not need patience.
It had been born with dominance.
After Genos Angelus rang, after its scales trembled, after it bled, it did not panic. It did not retreat.
It recalibrated.
Its single eye narrowed until the slit became a line, and for an instant I felt something like intelligence behind it, not animal cunning, but a cold evaluation.
Then the dragon's posture changed.
It lowered its center of gravity. It tucked its wings tighter. It pulled its head back slightly and angled its broken eye socket away from us, as if shielding the weakness out of instinct.
It did not look like a beast bracing for pain.
It looked like a predator deciding to finish.
Maxim saw it at the same time.
He raised his arm and snapped his fingers twice, sharp and clipped. A Zeus squad leader answered with a horn pattern, short-long-short. BWOO. BWOOOOO. BWOO.
The battlefield shifted.
Frontline teams disengaged in a controlled stagger, not a retreat, a rotation. The closest assault group peeled away from the forelegs and moved to the flanks, drawing the dragon's attention sideways while the second line stepped up to hold ground.
Shield-bearers locked again, but not in a single wedge now. They formed three overlapping walls, each offset behind the other like layered scales. Gaps were deliberate. Retreat corridors were deliberate. The formation looked messy from far away, but from within it was a map.
Hera's side mirrored it without copying. Her people did not take commands from Maxim. They took cues.
The Empress lifted two fingers.
That was all.
The ring around my position opened. Not because they abandoned me. Because they were making space for the healers to reach me and making space for the next motion.
I hated being the reason the ring had to move.
My legs felt like they belonged to someone else. My chest ached with every breath. The taste of blood would not leave my tongue, metallic and stubborn.
A healer grabbed my wrist before I could jerk away.
"Lady Alfia," she said, voice tight. "Sit."
"I can stand," I replied.
She did not argue. She hooked an arm around my waist and forced me down behind a broken ridge of rock where the dragon's line of sight was less direct.
The ridge did not feel like cover. Nothing felt like cover.
But it was an angle. Angles mattered.
She pressed a vial to my lips. "Drink."
The potion was bitter and cold. It burned on the way down. I swallowed because the alternative was dying uselessly.
The healer's hands moved quickly. A short chant. A palm pressed to my sternum. A warmth spread through my ribs like dull fire.
It did not fix the damage. It did not erase the relapse.
It dulled the worst edge of pain and forced my lungs to behave for a few more minutes.
"Your breathing," she snapped, as if I were a child. "Slow. You are tearing yourself."
I wanted to tell her that I had already been torn for years.
Instead, I closed my eyes and obeyed.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The world was still loud.
The dragon took a step forward.
Not toward the vanguard.
Toward the backline.
A direct line. A judgment. A decision.
It knew what mattered.
It wanted the mages and the healers.
It wanted the people who turned endurance into strategy.
Maxim's voice cut through the chaos again. "Backline, relocate. Second ridge! Supporters, smoke and shine. Now!"
Supporters moved like ants under a collapsing wall.
They were not combatants in the heroic sense, but they were the reason heroes could keep swinging.
Two runners dragged a wooden crate into position and slammed it open. Inside were sealed glass bulbs, metal canisters, and thick coils of rope. Items prepared not for elegance, but for function.
A Zeus supporter shouted, "Flash crystals ready!"
A Hera supporter answered, "Smoke jars ready!"
It sounded absurd, calling out like vendors at a market, but there was nothing casual about their hands. They moved with the practiced speed of people who had done this against Behemoth, against Leviathan, against things that made common monsters feel like jokes.
The first wave of smoke jars shattered at the dragon's feet.
KRASH.
Gray-black smoke surged upward in a violent bloom, laced with bitter alchemical scent. It was not meant to hide the entire battlefield. Nothing could hide from something that large.
It was meant to disrupt the dragon's vision and buy seconds while the backline relocated.
A second supporter hurled a canister that struck the ground and split open with a hiss. PSSSSHHH.
The smoke that followed was heavier, clinging low, crawling across the rock like fog with intent.
The dragon's head snapped down, irritated.
It inhaled.
The smoke was pulled straight into its maw like offerings.
For a heartbeat, I thought the attempt was pointless.
Then the smoke detonated.
Not an explosion. A reaction.
The cloud inside the dragon's throat ignited and expanded. WHUMPF.
The dragon jerked its head, coughing out a ragged roar that scraped the air. The breath weapon it had been building stuttered and vented upward, blasting into the sky instead of across the ground.
The air above the basin warped and screamed.
But the backline was still alive.
Someone shouted, half laugh, half sob. "It worked!"
Maxim's tone did not change. "Again. Do not waste the opening."
Flash crystals flew next.
They hit the ground and burst into white light so intense it turned the world into a blank page.
FSSSHHH.
Even behind the ridge, my eyes burned.
The dragon roared, more angry than pained. It thrashed its head, wings flexing, tail snapping into the smoke.
WHUM. WHUM.
Chunks of rock became shrapnel. A shield wall caught one boulder and shattered. KRAK.
Men fell.
Not swept away. Not erased. But forced down.
Then they rose again.
That was the difference between the peak and everyone else.
Lower adventurers died in the first mistake.
The peak could make a mistake and still stand up to make the next correction.
Hera's strike team used the flash.
They surged in along a preplanned lane, not to "attack," but to deploy.
Two of them carried thick metal stakes with runic markings. They drove them into cracks in the rock near the dragon's foreleg.
CLANG. CLANG.
A third adventurer slapped a small disk against the stake and twisted it.
The disk hummed, then sank slightly into the earth, as if the rock had softened for it.
A trap.
Not a pit. Not something childish.
A field anchor.
The moment the dragon shifted weight, the runes flared.
Lines of light snapped across the ground, connecting stake to stake, forming a lattice that resisted motion for a fraction of a second.
The dragon's claw tried to lift.
The lattice held.
The claw did not rise cleanly.
It dragged.
That drag was enough.
Maxim shouted, "Break point! Now!"
Zald hit the exposed seam like a falling hammer.
WHAM.
Maxim followed, aiming at the same cracked plate, driving through with brutal consistency.
KADOOM.
The plate sheared.
Another chunk of scale broke off.
The dragon bled again.
This time the blood splashed across the lattice and hissed as if it hated the concept of being contained.
The dragon's single eye widened, then narrowed.
It stopped coughing.
Its breathing steadied.
It looked forward and did something that made my skin crawl.
It smiled.
Not with lips.
With posture.
With the way it raised its head higher and let its wings unfurl fully, slow and deliberate, as if to show us what we were about to be crushed beneath.
Wind exploded outward, strong enough to lift dust into a cyclone.
WHOOOOOM.
The smoke was shredded.
The flash-burned afterimage lingered in the air, but the dragon did not care.
It had accepted the inconveniences.
Now it escalated.
It beat its wings once.
The shockwave did not merely push air.
It pushed people.
Shield walls skidded. Runners flew off their feet. One crate spun and burst open, vials shattering across rock like spilled jewels.
TINK. TINK. TINK.
Then the dragon's tail swept low.
It did not aim for the frontline anymore.
It aimed for the supply lanes.
It aimed for the heart.
WHUM.
The tail carved through a cluster of supporters and the ridge behind them, pulverizing stone into dust. Bodies disappeared in that dust.
My stomach clenched, not with fear, with rage that had nowhere to go.
The healer beside me hissed, "Stay down!"
I tried to rise anyway.
My legs buckled.
A new surge of numbness crawled up my thigh, cold and disabling.
Gif Blessing laughed inside my nerves and reminded me that even now, even here, my body was not mine.
I slammed my fist into the rock.
Pain shot up my arm. It was useful. It was a signal that I could still feel something.
"Alfia," the healer snapped, "you will die if you move now."
I did not answer.
I breathed.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I stared past the ridge.
Maxim and Zald were still there, still striking, still forcing the dragon to commit.
The Empress moved like a shadow that cut.
Her Afterglow slashes did not aim for damage alone. They aimed for tempo. Each shockwave was timed to interrupt a wing beat, to force a head jerk, to steal the rhythm that the dragon was trying to establish.
It was a dance with a hurricane.
Hera's squad leaders shouted short calls.
"Rotate!" "Pull back!" "Lane open!"
Zeus's side answered with horn signals and hand signs.
It was messy and human and full of loss, but it was also order.
Then the dragon changed again.
Its chest expanded.
Its throat glowed with a dim, hateful light.
Not a beam. Not a cone.
A pulse.
A roar compressed into a weapon.
The air went still.
Even the wind from its wings seemed to hesitate.
Maxim's eyes widened. "Down! Down!"
Too late.
The roar hit.
VRRROOOOOOOOM.
It was not simply loud. It was structured.
A pressure wave that slapped across the battlefield in a flat arc, shattering weaker barriers, breaking concentration, turning chants into stutters.
Several mages in the backline choked mid-spell. Their circles flickered and collapsed.
A supporter screamed as his ears bled.
The ridge I hid behind cracked.
My bones rang.
Silentium Eden did nothing. It could not negate existence.
The healer beside me flinched, then leaned over me, hands already moving again.
"Analgesic first," she muttered. "Then stabilization."
She pressed a small, warm pouch to my neck. It smelled like crushed herbs and something sharper.
Heat spread through my nerves, dulling the pain and pushing the paralysis back, not erasing it, but forcing it to retreat for a moment.
My limbs tingled.
I could move again.
Barely.
"You will not cast another bell," she said, eyes hard. "Your lungs will fail. Your heart will fail."
I met her gaze.
She did not look away.
"You are Hera's," she added. "We do not throw away assets."
Assets.
That was a cruel word.
It was also honest.
I nodded once.
I had no intention of casting Genos Angelus again anyway.
That bell had been a statement.
This next action needed to be a blade.
I rose, slower than I wanted, steadier than I expected.
The healer caught my sleeve. "If you go now, you will be hit."
"I know."
She shoved another vial into my hand. "Then take this. It will keep you upright for three minutes. No more. After that, I cannot promise anything."
I took it.
It was warm, like it had been held close to someone's body.
I drank.
The potion hit my bloodstream like fire.
My vision sharpened. My heartbeat steadied into something unnaturally controlled. The pain dulled into a distant throb that I could ignore.
Three minutes.
Fine.
I stepped out from behind the ridge.
The battlefield was no longer a basin.
It was a machine under stress.
Frontline teams rotated like gears, absorbing impact, then pulling back before they shattered. Backline mages relocated in clusters under shield escort. Supporters moved along marked lanes, delivering vials and items, retrieving wounded, dragging crates.
A runner sprinted past me with a bundle of rope and hooks. A second carried a jar of luminous powder. A third pushed a small wheeled frame loaded with heavy canisters.
Improvised siege, built from adventurer logic.
The dragon lifted one foreclaw and slammed it down toward the backline again.
A shield wall intercepted, bracing.
The wall shattered.
But it bought enough time for a trap team to act.
A Hera supporter rolled a heavy canister under the dragon's chest and yanked a cord.
CHK-CHK.
The canister burst.
Not light.
Not smoke.
A sticky, tar-like substance sprayed upward and clung to the dragon's scales, thick and glistening.
The dragon's wing muscles flexed.
The tar resisted.
It was not strong enough to stop flight.
But it slowed the wing beat.
That was all the opening the Empress needed.
She struck the tarred wing joint with Afterglow.
SHRAAANG.
The shockwave drove the tar deeper into the joint seam and forced the wing to jerk.
The dragon roared, furious, and turned its head toward the Empress.
Maxim saw the shift.
He shouted, "All strike teams, commit! Force the head away from the healers!"
A dangerous call.
A necessary one.
Zald moved first, sprinting into the space beneath the dragon's neck like a man racing into the shadow of a collapsing tower.
He raised his greatsword.
The dragon's head came down.
If it hit him cleanly, it would erase him.
Maxim intercepted, not by blocking, but by striking the jawline with such force that the dragon's head was forced to tilt.
KADOOM.
The impact rattled the dragon, and Zald's blade slammed into the exposed underside of the jaw.
WHAM.
The dragon bled black steam.
For a heartbeat, its head stayed low.
That was my moment.
I could see the seams.
Not from being special.
From being forced to learn.
The dragon's breath weapon, the structured roar, the wing beat timing, all of it had a rhythm.
And rhythm could be interrupted.
I stepped forward.
My anti-magic dress dragged at my movement like a reminder of limits.
Silentium Eden shimmered over my skin.
I raised my hand.
Not for Genos Angelus.
For something smaller.
Faster.
Sharper.
I spoke the name without flourish.
"Satanas Verion."
The block of sound slammed into the dragon's ear region, the area where balance lived.
GONK.
The dragon's head jerked.
I cast again, adjusting angle.
GONK.
The second impact forced the dragon's neck to twist, not enough to injure, enough to disrupt its targeting.
Maxim used the disruption instantly. He drove his weapon into the neck seam where scales overlapped.
KRAK.
The Empress's Afterglow followed from the side, striking the tarred wing joint again.
SHRAAANG.
Zald planted his blade into the broken plate at the foreleg like a wedge, forcing the dragon to bear weight unevenly.
The dragon roared in rage and tried to inhale for the breath weapon.
A Zeus supporter hurled a jar straight into its open maw.
The jar shattered inside.
A flash.
A chemical burn.
FSSSH. WHUMPF.
The dragon choked, its breath weapon stuttering into a half-formed blast that vented upward.
The sky screamed.
The ground lived.
For the first time since the bell, the battlefield had breathing room.
Not peace.
Not safety.
A window.
I felt the potion's artificial steadiness begin to fade.
Pain crept back in like a tide.
My lungs tightened.
Three minutes.
Almost done.
I took one more step forward, forcing my spine straight.
And I thought of Meteria, not in a bed, but smiling as she asked for the dragon's eye.
I did not have the luxury of hope.
But I could still choose direction.
'Hold,' I told myself, and the thought was cold and clean. Hold the line long enough for someone else to live.
The dragon's single eye locked onto me again.
This time, there was no confusion.
Only recognition.
It had learned my role.
And it decided to remove me.
The dragon's chest expanded.
Its throat glowed.
Not a structured roar.
Not a breath weapon.
Something denser.
Something aimed.
I felt my blood go cold.
I raised my arm, Silentium Eden ready.
And behind me, I heard Maxim shout my name like a warning.
"ALFIA!"
The dragon released.
The attack was not a beam.
Not a cone.
Not even a roar shaped into force.
It was a line.
A needle of compressed darkness and heat that cut through air as if the world had been drawn on paper and the dragon's breath was an ink blade.
For an instant, there was no sound.
Then the line passed, and the sound arrived late.
SSSSHHHK.
The ridge behind me did not explode. It simply disappeared, sliced cleanly, the cut surface glowing like molten glass.
If I had been standing where I was a heartbeat ago, there would not have been enough of me left to fall.
My body moved before my mind understood.
Not elegance.
Not a hero's leap.
A desperate twist.
My boots scraped over rock, and my shoulder slammed into the ground.
SKRRK. THUD.
Heat grazed my side, close enough that my skin screamed.
The edge of my anti-magic dress curled and blackened.
Silentium Eden swallowed what it could, but the line was not purely magic. It was something that behaved like magic while carrying raw physical annihilation.
It clipped me anyway.
Pain flared hot, sharp, immediate.
I tasted blood.
Again.
Not from my lungs this time.
From biting my tongue hard enough to keep the scream inside.
A second line followed.
The dragon corrected.
It learned.
It aimed where I would roll.
I forced my body to do the opposite.
I pushed up, not into a standing position, but into a half-crouch, and threw myself sideways, toward a broken outcrop that could interfere with line-of-sight for half a second.
THUD.
The line carved through the air where my head had been.
The outcrop behind me split in two, glowing at the cut.
For a brief moment I lay in the dust, chest heaving, and realized I had just used up my luck for the day.
Luck did not exist.
But if it did, mine would be bankrupt.
I tried to inhale.
My lungs seized.
Not fully, but enough to remind me that Gif Blessing did not care about close calls.
I coughed, and the cough tore at my ribs.
Blood splattered onto the rock beside my hand.
My fingers trembled.
The potion's steadiness had faded, leaving behind the raw, ugly truth of my body.
Pain, weakness, and the thin string of will holding everything together.
I pushed myself up anyway.
The battlefield did not wait for me to decide whether I deserved to stand.
The dragon's single eye tracked me.
It did not look surprised that I lived.
It looked annoyed.
Its head tilted slightly, as if it had expected a cleaner outcome.
I hated that.
Not because I wanted to die.
Because the contempt felt personal.
A shout cut across the battlefield.
"Alfia! Fall back!"
Hera's voice.
Not the goddess. A captain. Someone who had earned the right to call my name like an order.
I did not answer.
I forced my feet under me, stood, and immediately felt the world tilt.
My left side burned where the line had grazed me. My right side ached from the impact of the dodge. My chest felt like it was filled with hot sand.
A healer sprinted toward me from the rear lane, but the dragon's tail snapped out, low and fast, cutting the space between us.
The healer stopped short, swore, then ducked behind a shield wall that was already cracking.
Maxim's horn sounded, long and heavy. BWOOOOO.
It was not a signal for advance.
It was a signal for consolidation.
The front line compressed. The backline shifted again.
They were already adapting to phase two.
But the cost of adaptation was paid in bodies.
The dragon moved with purpose now.
It did not lash out randomly.
It targeted the structure.
It targeted the places where order formed.
A shield wall went down under a wing beat. A mage line lost three casters to a single sweep. Two supporters were crushed when a supply frame flipped and pinned them under metal.
Every mistake became fatal.
Every delay became fatal.
Maxim and the Empress were still fighting like pillars holding up a collapsing ceiling, but even pillars cracked when the weight increased.
Maxim struck the dragon's jaw again, trying to keep it from aiming that needle-line at the backline.
KADOOM.
The dragon's head jerked.
Then it snapped back, faster, and bit.
Not a bite meant to chew.
A bite meant to remove.
Maxim barely escaped, but the wind of the dragon's teeth tore his cloak and scored his armor. The sound was horrible, metal bending like wet wood.
SKRRRREE.
Zald surged in, greatsword slamming into the side of the dragon's neck to punish the bite attempt.
WHAM.
The dragon's blood hissed.
It turned its head, irritated.
The Empress struck the wing joint again with Afterglow.
SHRAAANG.
The wing faltered.
The dragon responded by beating both wings at once.
The shockwave was monstrous.
It flattened smoke, scattered dust, and slammed into the vanguard like a giant's hand.
WHOOOOM.
Men flew.
Not the peak.
Not the leaders.
But the ones who filled the spaces between leaders, the glue that made formation possible.
Shield-bearers rolled. Spear users skidded. A supporter slammed into a rock and did not move.
The vanguard reformed.
Slower.
The cracks began to show.
Not in courage.
In timing.
In coordination.
In the small hesitations that appeared when bodies were too tired to obey instantly.
I had seen it before.
Leviathan had nearly broken us like this, not by being stronger, but by forcing us to react until we ran out of reactions.
The dragon was doing it faster.
I tried to step forward.
My leg betrayed me.
A numbness crawled up my thigh again, deeper this time. Paralysis, a cold lock.
I staggered.
My vision narrowed.
I heard, distantly, the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears.
Thum. Thum. Thum.
A hand caught my arm.
A Hera adventurer, face smeared with soot, eyes sharp with exhaustion.
"Lady Alfia," he said, voice harsh. "Back. Now."
I wanted to tear my arm away.
I did not.
Because my body would not let me.
He dragged me toward the rear lane, half carrying me, half pushing.
The healer reached us then, breath ragged.
She looked at the burn on my side, and her expression tightened.
"Of course," she muttered. "Of course you get clipped."
She pressed her palm to my wound. Warmth spread, but it was shallow, like a bandage placed on something deeper.
"This is not healing," she snapped at me, as if I had accused her. "This is keeping you from bleeding out. You are still damaged."
"I know."
She shoved a vial into my hand. "Drink."
I drank.
The bitterness was worse than before.
It settled in my stomach like a stone.
For a moment, the numbness retreated.
My leg became mine again.
But the cough remained.
The blood remained.
The weakness remained.
"You cast too much," she said, eyes fierce. "You pushed too far."
I looked past her.
The dragon was advancing again, pressing toward the backline lanes.
Maxim and the Empress fought it, but the dragon's attacks were more precise now. It waited for openings. It punished rotations. It targeted the gaps between shield walls.
"Then I should have cast more," I replied.
The healer stared at me like I was insane.
Maybe I was.
Maybe sanity was a luxury for people who believed in futures.
A horn sounded again, different pattern.
Hera's side.
A retreat signal, controlled.
Not a rout.
Not yet.
But a pullback to a second line of prepared positions: ridges, anchored stakes, cleared lanes. The supporters began dragging surviving supplies toward those positions.
The battlefield was becoming layered.
A series of falling lines, like a dam breaking one barrier at a time.
I watched a squad of mid-tier adventurers hold a ridge against the dragon's pressure.
They were not the Empress. Not Maxim. Not Zald.
They were the people who made the peak possible.
They raised shields. They threw smoke. They planted anchors. They died.
One of them, a young spear user, slipped on blood and fell into the open.
The dragon's tail snapped toward him.
A Hera captain lunged and shoved the spear user aside, taking the tail strike across his own torso.
The captain's body folded.
The spear user screamed.
The captain did not answer.
The spear user stood again, shaking, and rejoined the line.
That was Orario's peak.
Not just the legends at the front.
The hundreds behind them who kept stepping forward even as the world proved they were disposable.
And for the first time, despair crept into the structure.
Not as cowardice.
As inevitability.
The dragon pressed, and pressed, and pressed.
And the vanguard began to look like a tired animal forced to keep fighting after its muscles had already failed.
I saw Maxim's shoulder dip slightly after a strike, the tiniest delay in recovery.
I saw Zald's stance widen, not as a technique, as a compensation.
I saw the Empress's Afterglow slashes lose a fraction of crispness at the edge, as if even her power had begun to fray under repeated output.
They were still gods among men.
But gods bled too.
The dragon beat its wings again.
This time, the wind carried something else.
Dust that burned.
Ash that stung.
A fine particulate that filled mouths and eyes and lungs.
A battlefield hazard, deliberate.
Supporters coughed. Mages blinked hard, trying to keep their circles steady.
I felt it in my lungs immediately.
My chest tightened.
A cough tore out of me.
Blood followed.
I clenched my jaw, furious.
My disease had found a way to cooperate with the dragon.
The healer cursed and pressed another pouch to my throat.
"Do not inhale through your mouth," she snapped.
As if I could control it.
As if the body listened.
I did not answer.
I stared at the dragon's single eye.
It was not focused on me anymore.
It had learned I was not the priority.
It had learned the structure.
Now it looked beyond the frontline, beyond the leaders, toward the backline where the last supplies were being pulled away.
It wanted to remove their capacity to continue.
A simple tactic.
A perfect tactic.
And for the first time, I felt something I had not allowed myself to feel since the march began.
Helplessness.
Not because I was weak.
Because my strength was not enough.
I thought of Meteria again.
Not her smile.
Her frailty.
Her quiet acceptance of the fact that she would not be here to see the world change.
If I died here, she would die alone in a bed, with people pretending not to cry.
If I lived, she would still die.
There was no victory that saved her.
That truth cracked something inside me.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just a small, cold fracture.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to ask why the world demanded so much from us and gave so little back.
Instead, I stood there, shaking, blood on my lips, and forced myself to breathe.
Because the battlefield did not care about my grief.
Because the dragon did not care about my grief.
Because Meteria, if she could speak right now, would tell me not to waste the time she did not have.
A horn sounded again.
This one was not controlled.
It was panicked.
A backline signal.
A warning of a breach.
The dragon's needle-line attack carved through a supply lane, cutting a corridor open and exposing the healer cluster.
People screamed.
A mage fell mid-chant.
A supporter dropped a crate and ran.
The second line was failing faster than planned.
Maxim turned his head toward the breach, and for a moment, the expression on his face was not command.
It was despair.
Zald saw it.
The Empress saw it.
I saw it.
A moment where even the peak questioned whether endurance was possible.
Then Maxim shouted anyway, voice tearing itself raw.
"Hold! HOLD!"
The call was not a strategy.
It was a prayer.
And the battlefield answered, not because they believed in miracles, but because they had no other choice.
I stepped forward.
My healer grabbed my sleeve. "Where are you going?"
"Back in," I said.
"You will fall."
"Yes."
"Then stay," she hissed. "You have done enough."
Enough.
That word again.
I looked at her, calm mask barely holding.
"There is no 'enough' against this," I said. "There is only time."
She stared at me, and for a moment I saw fear in her eyes.
Not fear of the dragon.
Fear of watching someone choose to burn themselves out.
I did not give her time to argue.
I pulled my sleeve free and walked toward the collapsing line.
Each step felt heavier.
Each breath tasted like blood and ash.
But I walked anyway.
Because even if we were going to fall, I refused to fall quietly.
Not while Meteria still waited for a story.
Not while the dragon still stood.
Not while the peak of Orario still had breath.
The dragon did not rush.
That was the most frightening part.
It had learned our tempo. It had learned our signals. It had learned that the front line was not "the front" and the back line was not "the back." Everything was connected, and if it severed the connective tissue, the peak would be forced to fight alone.
It watched us the way a storm watches a shoreline. Patient, inevitable, almost bored.
I stepped back into the collapsing line and forced my breathing into something usable. The healer's touch had dulled my pain, not erased it. My left side still burned where the needle-line had grazed me. My lungs still felt too tight for the air they were given.
Maxim's horn sounded again. Three short blasts, then one long. BWOO BWOO BWOO BWOOOOO.
Consolidate. Brace. Prepare for an unknown strike.
The shield walls adjusted, overlapping like scales. The remaining supporters moved with frantic discipline, distributing items that had been hoarded for exactly this moment. Glass spheres wrapped in cloth. Bundles of cord with hooks. Heavy canisters with fuses. Plates of metal stamped with runes that were meant to anchor barriers to the earth.
They were not soldiers, but they were not amateurs either.
They had already killed the Behemoth.
They had already killed the Leviathan.
The stories told in taverns made those victories sound clean. They were not. They were long, bitter, and paid for in names that no one wanted to remember.
This was different.
This was not a calamity that could be outlasted until it made a mistake.
The One Eyed Black Dragon did not make mistakes. It created them, and then punished us for stepping into them.
Zald passed through my peripheral vision, armor scorched, breathing heavier, but still moving like a man who refused to accept the concept of retreat. He took position near the broken foreleg seam, as if he intended to keep the dragon's weight pinned there.
The Empress stood further out, blade low, cloak torn, eyes sharp with a quiet anger that never needed to become loud. Her Afterglow had been striking for so long that the air around her felt perpetually tense, like it was waiting to be cut again.
Maxim's stance had changed. He still looked steady, but I could see it. A fraction slower on recovery. A fraction more careful with distance. Not fear. Conservation.
Even the peak rationed themselves when they understood the fight could not be won quickly.
The dragon's chest expanded.
Not like a breath weapon.
Like it was drawing the world into its ribs.
Wind pulled inward. Dust rose. The basin's broken stones began to tremble, then lift, as if gravity had been asked politely to loosen its grip.
Supporters shouted warnings. Mages tried to stabilize their circles as the air tugged at their glyphs.
A Zeus squad leader yelled, "Back line, anchor! All casters, ground your circles!"
A Hera captain answered, "Barrier teams, now!"
This was not the dragon aiming at one person.
This was the dragon aiming at the battlefield.
I felt a chill crawl up my spine, not from cold, from recognition.
This was the moment monsters used when they decided the hunt had lasted long enough.
Not a finishing strike in the sense of targeting a throat.
A finishing strike in the sense of erasing the arena.
The dragon's wings spread fully.
Not in anger.
In ceremony.
It beat them once, slow.
The air snapped.
WHOOOOOM.
A ring of pressure rolled outward and flattened anything not braced. Several supporters were thrown off their feet even behind shield walls. A mage's circle collapsed mid-chant. Another mage screamed as backlash bit into his throat, blood spraying in a fine arc.
Then the dragon roared.
But it was not a roar shaped for fear.
It was a roar shaped for collapse.
The sound carried in layers, like multiple frequencies stacked together, each tuned to a different part of the human body.
VRRROOOOOOOOM.
My ribs rang. My teeth hurt. My vision blurred.
And then the ground itself responded.
Cracks spidered through rock. The basin's floor lit with faint lines, as if something underneath was waking up.
A prepared trap lattice, I realized too late. Not ours.
Its.
The dragon had been using the basin as a vessel.
It exhaled downward.
Not a beam.
A breath that spread into the cracks and used them like veins.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then the basin erupted.
Black heat surged upward through every fracture at once. Not flame, not light, but something like voidfire edged with ash. It lanced up in pillars and sheets, forming a dome that expanded outward faster than sprinting feet.
Large scale.
Unavoidable.
A weapon meant to catch everyone, not just the slow.
"BARRIER!" Maxim roared.
Barrier teams slammed rune plates into the ground. Mages pushed their palms down, forcing energy into circles that resisted the eruption.
"Hold it! HOLD IT!" a caster screamed.
A dome of pale light formed around a cluster of supporters and healers. Another barrier flared around a group of wounded being dragged backward. The shield walls turned inward, not to face the dragon, but to form a protective ring around the barrier cores.
It almost looked like it might work.
Then the black heat hit.
The first barrier flickered and dimmed, like a lantern placed in a storm.
The second barrier cracked at the edges.
The shield ring glowed red as the heat climbed into metal.
People screamed.
Not in fear.
In pain.
The dome held for two breaths.
Then it shattered.
KRRAAANG.
The eruption swallowed the cluster.
Supporters vanished first. Their bodies were not torn apart in gore. They were simply erased, reduced to ash and drifting fragments of cloth.
Mages tried to run.
The ground beneath them burst again, cutting off escape lanes.
A healer reached for a wounded man.
The eruption caught her arm. She screamed once, and then she was gone from the shoulder down.
I saw it all in flashes because my mind refused to keep more than a few frames at a time. Too much death turned memory into noise.
The basin became a furnace.
The dragon stood in the center of it like a god who had decided the world should burn.
My anti-magic dress curled at the edges as the heat reached me. Silentium Eden flared, swallowing what it could of the unnatural energy, but the eruption was not "spellwork" in the usual sense. It was an environmental rewrite.
Negation could not delete the ground.
The heat slammed into my lungs.
I coughed.
Blood sprayed into the ash.
My knees buckled.
For a heartbeat, paralysis caught my legs again, a cold lock timed with cruel precision.
I forced myself to move anyway.
I staggered toward a broken ridge that had survived earlier cuts. Not cover. Not safety. Just stone thick enough to steal a fraction of heat if I pressed my body against its shadow.
A Hera veteran grabbed my arm, dragging me with him.
His face was old by adventurer standards. Scars carved across his cheeks like thin rivers. His eyes were steady, tired, familiar with endings.
He shoved me behind the ridge and planted himself between me and the eruption.
The heat hit him full.
His cloak ignited.
He did not scream.
He turned his head slightly, looked at me once, and said, "Do not waste it."
Then he was gone.
The ridge glowed. My skin blistered where it touched stone. I clenched my jaw and forced my breath into shallow sips.
Inhale. Exhale.
The eruption continued.
Not one pulse.
Many.
A sequence.
Like the dragon was sweeping the entire basin, forcing every pocket of cover to fail one after another.
This was not an attack designed to kill one target.
It was designed to kill the supporting ecosystem of battle.
When the heat finally began to recede, the silence that followed was obscene.
Not the quiet of peace.
The quiet of an emptied room.
Ash drifted down in slow flakes. The smell was not smoke. It was cooked blood and scorched metal.
The ground was blackened glass in places, cracked and steaming.
I pushed myself up, trembling. My hands shook. My vision swam. My throat burned.
I looked around.
The battlefield was no longer crowded.
It had become sparse.
Wide, empty distances between the few who still stood.
The level five and six core had been erased.
Not because they were weak.
Because they were too human to survive a god's tantrum.
A few silhouettes moved in the ash, staggering, but many were not moving at all. Some were missing limbs. Some were charred shapes curled in final posture. A few crawled, fingers scraping uselessly over melted rock.
Healers were gone.
Most supporters were gone.
The supply lanes were gone.
The machine that had kept the peak functioning had been smashed.
Now it was just the peak.
And even they looked smaller in the open.
Maxim stood, but his armor was warped. One pauldron hung loose, straps burned through. His weapon was still in his hand, but his breathing was ragged, the first time I had seen his composure break at the edge.
The Empress remained upright, cloak half gone, hair singed, blade chipped. The air around her still felt dangerous, but her shoulders had lowered a fraction, as if the weight of the world had finally pressed into her bones.
Zald was still there.
He was on one knee, greatsword planted in the glassed ground like a tombstone. Steam rose from his gauntlets. When he lifted his head, his eyes were bloodshot, but focused.
A handful of other veterans moved, fewer than my mind wanted to count. Older adventurers who had reached the seventh step long ago, who had survived too many battles to die quickly.
They were not untouched.
They were simply too stubborn to stop.
And then there was me.
A level seven who did not feel like it anymore.
A mage who could barely draw breath without tasting iron.
The dragon's single eye swept across us.
It had taken damage. I could see it now. The cracked foreleg seam had widened. Several scales were missing from its neck and shoulder. Black blood still steamed where it dripped onto the ground.
But the damage looked like a hunt that had just begun.
We had bled it.
We had forced it to respect us.
And still, it felt as though its vitality had barely dipped below a threshold that mattered.
Two fifths, maybe.
A cruel estimate.
In any sane battle, that would be progress.
Here, it was a joke.
The dragon lifted its head and exhaled slowly.
Not an attack.
A statement.
Its breath rolled over the basin, stirring ash into spirals, and I realized that the dragon was not exhausted.
It had not even reached its limit.
It had simply decided that the first phase of the fight was boring.
My stomach twisted, not from nausea, from despair.
This was the point where people stopped believing in strategy.
Where survivors began to fight as individuals because the structure that made teamwork possible had been burned away.
I heard someone sob.
A veteran, not a supporter.
A man with white hair and a broken shield, shoulders shaking as he stared at the place where his squad had been.
Maxim shouted, voice hoarse, "Eyes up! You die looking down!"
The sob stopped.
The man lifted his head.
He did not look healed.
He looked hollow.
But he raised his weapon anyway.
The Empress spoke, calm and lethal. "We have no support. Then we become the support."
A bitter laugh escaped someone, thin and cracked. "With what, our bones?"
"Then with our bones," the Empress replied.
Zald's voice rumbled, low. "It is still bleeding."
Maxim answered him, almost snarling. "Then keep it bleeding."
Orders. Short. Simple.
Because complicated plans required time and manpower, and those were gone.
I tried to draw a full breath.
My lungs refused.
I coughed again, and blood splattered onto the glassed ground.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and felt the fabric stick to my skin. The burn on my side had reopened. The scab, if it could be called that, had never fully formed.
The healer who had kept me upright was gone. There would be no more reprieve. No more potions handed to me with angry eyes. No more hands pressing warmth into my ribs.
It was just me, my failing body, and the dragon.
Meteria's face rose in my mind.
Not frail this time.
Not coughing.
Just her eyes, steady, as if she could see through time and tell me something I did not want to admit.
'You do not have to win,' her voice seemed to say. 'You just have to choose what you protect.'
My calm mask cracked for half a heartbeat.
Then I forced it back into place.
If the world wanted to take everything, then I would decide what it had to pay for.
I raised my hand.
Not high.
Not dramatic.
Just enough to mark that I was still here.
Silentium Eden shimmered over my skin, thin but present.
The dragon's eye narrowed.
It remembered my bell.
It remembered my blocks of sound.
It shifted its weight, preparing to move again.
The last remaining formation, made of captains and veterans, tightened.
Not because we believed we could win.
Because we refused to die scattered.
Maxim's horn sounded, one last clean signal. BWOOOOO.
Advance.
And we stepped forward into the ash, toward a monster that still had far too much life left in it.
The ash had not finished falling when the dragon stopped moving.
Not because it was tired.
Because it wanted us to notice.
Its single eye swept across the basin, slow, deliberate, like a lantern searching an empty room. It lingered on the places where our formations used to be. It lingered on the scorched lanes where supporters had run. It lingered on the melted circles where mages had died mid-chant.
Then it looked at us.
The few who still stood.
And the pressure changed.
Before, the dragon had treated us like obstacles. Now it treated us like prey it intended to savor.
It took one step forward and did not attack.
The sound of that step was enough.
THUM.
Glass-cracked ground shivered. A low tremor crawled through bones.
Maxim raised his horn and gave a single long blast.
BWOOOOO.
Not advance. Not retreat.
Hold.
The veterans moved into a tight arc. Not a full ring. There were not enough of us for that. The Empress took the left, Maxim took the center, Zald anchored the right near the wounded foreleg seam, where the dragon's weight still favored a bad angle.
I stood behind the front by a few meters, not because I wanted safety, because my lungs needed a second to remember how to work.
I could hear the wet rasp of my own breathing.
Hhk. Hhk.
Blood tasted like iron and burnt herbs.
The dragon's head lowered.
It did not roar.
It exhaled softly, and the ash on the ground drifted outward in a slow circle. The movement looked gentle, almost mocking.
Then it spoke in its own way.
A thin, ugly sound, like a blade dragged across stone.
SKRRR.
The air around us tightened.
Not magic as a circle. Not an element as a spell.
More like the world being reminded that it belonged to something older.
Several veterans flinched. A man with a cracked shield swallowed hard, throat bobbing visibly. Another clenched his jaw until I heard teeth grind.
Maxim did not look back at them.
He stared at the dragon and lifted his weapon slightly, as if daring it to stop playing.
The Empress said, calm and flat, "It wants us to panic."
No one answered. They did not need to.
The dragon took another step.
THUM.
Still no attack.
It was pacing.
Letting the silence rot in our mouths.
Then it moved.
Not a breath weapon. Not an eruption.
A simple lunge.
The dragon's head snapped forward like a spear, targeting the far right edge of our arc.
A veteran there raised his weapon.
Too late.
The dragon's jaw closed.
KRUNCH.
The veteran vanished up to the waist. The rest of his body hit the ground in a useless tumble, legs still twitching as if they had not been told the truth yet.
The dragon released him like discarded meat.
It did not swallow.
It wanted us to see.
Zald roared and surged forward, greatsword swinging up into the dragon's lower jaw.
WHAM.
Black blood steamed.
The dragon's head jerked, and the force of that jerk hurled Zald backward three steps. He dug his boots into the glassed ground and stopped, breathing hard, eyes furious.
The Empress struck the wing joint with Afterglow.
SHRAAANG.
The shockwave forced the wing to twitch inward.
Maxim followed with a hard strike to the neck seam.
KADOOM.
We hit it cleanly. We hit it like the peak we were.
The dragon barely recoiled.
Then it did it again.
Another lunge, this time angled left.
The Empress moved first, intercepting with a slash meant to redirect the head rather than stop it.
SHRAAANG.
The dragon's head shifted a fraction.
The fraction was not enough.
A veteran behind the Empress, already injured, raised a shield that was more molten than metal.
The dragon's teeth closed around the shield.
The shield shattered.
The veteran screamed once.
Then the scream became a wet sound as the dragon's teeth crushed the center of his chest.
CRRRK.
The dragon released him.
It watched him fall.
Two kills. Clean. Slow.
It was not trying to erase us with scale-wide attacks now.
It was dismantling us one by one, the way a predator breaks a herd.
My stomach twisted.
Not fear.
Rage.
And underneath rage, the ugly cold of comprehension.
It was not just killing bodies.
It was killing hope.
Maxim's voice cut through the tightening silence.
"Rotation! Do not clump! Force its aim!"
We moved in response. We were too experienced to freeze.
The arc loosened, then tightened again, shifting angles, changing targets, trying to deny the dragon simple selections.
It did not matter.
The dragon chose anyway.
A sudden tail snap, precise, not wide.
WHIP.
It caught a veteran at the knee.
The leg shattered.
The veteran fell.
The dragon's head dropped immediately and bit down at the fallen man's shoulder.
KRUNCH.
The veteran's arm tore free.
Blood hissed on the hot ground.
The veteran did not scream. He gritted his teeth and tried to push himself backward with one arm.
He made it half a meter.
Then the dragon's claw came down.
THUD.
The veteran disappeared under black scales.
The claw lifted.
There was nothing left.
I felt something inside me crack, small and sharp.
We were not being out-fought.
We were being executed.
The Empress's breath tightened. Her voice remained steady, but I heard the strain under it.
"Maxim," she said. "It is choosing."
"I know," Maxim replied.
His eyes flicked once, fast, toward me and Zald.
Not a look of affection.
A look of calculation.
And in that calculation was a decision I did not want.
He was thinking about what had to survive.
Zald moved again, faster than his size should allow. He slammed his sword into the wounded foreleg seam, trying to force the dragon's stance to collapse.
WHAM.
The dragon's weight shifted.
The foreleg buckled a fraction.
The dragon's single eye narrowed.
It did not like being forced to adjust.
It responded with a low, controlled exhale. Not an attack, a warning.
Heat rolled over us.
Zald did something then that I will remember until my lungs stop working.
He crouched, one gauntleted hand reaching down to the glassed ground where black blood had pooled in thick tar-like streaks. He scraped it up along with a chipped fragment of scale that had fallen earlier. The scale was jagged, still steaming at the edges.
He lifted the chip.
He looked at it like a man looking at a final ration.
Then he shoved it into his mouth.
CRUNCH.
The sound was obscene.
Not because of volume.
Because of meaning.
He chewed. Once. Twice. Blood ran down his chin, not his own at first, then his own as the scale cut his mouth from the inside.
He swallowed.
The tar-like blood followed, smeared across his lips and teeth like ink.
His body shuddered.
For a heartbeat, I thought he would vomit.
Then the air around him changed.
Not light. Not aura.
Density.
His shoulders rose slightly. His stance became heavier, as if the ground had started respecting him more.
His eyes, already hard, became colder.
He inhaled, and the breath sounded like a furnace pulling air.
Hhhh.
Maxim saw it and did not scold him.
The Empress saw it and did not flinch.
The veterans saw it and understood.
Last resort.
Sacrilege.
Survival.
Zald lifted his greatsword again.
His voice rumbled, low enough that only those near him could hear.
'If it will not die, then I will become something that can make it bleed longer.'
I did not answer.
I could not.
My throat was too tight.
The dragon lunged at him immediately, as if it sensed the change and wanted to erase it before it grew.
Zald did not dodge.
He stepped in.
He took the bite against his blade and his armor, bracing with sheer brutality.
KRRAAANG.
Teeth scraped metal.
Sparks flew.
Zald's boots carved trenches in the glassed ground as he held the jaw open for a fraction of a second.
That fraction was enough.
Maxim struck the side of the dragon's neck.
KADOOM.
The Empress struck the wing joint again.
SHRAAANG.
I raised my hand and fired Satanas Verion into the ear region, not to damage, to disrupt balance.
GONK.
The dragon's head jerked.
Zald used the jerk to drive his greatsword up into the underside of the jaw.
WHAM.
Black blood poured.
The dragon released Zald and recoiled.
For the first time since the eruption, the dragon looked irritated rather than amused.
Good.
But irritation did not mean weakness.
It meant escalation.
The dragon's single eye narrowed into a slit.
It shifted its weight and then snapped its head to the left, targeting Maxim directly.
Not a lunge this time.
A needle-line.
The same sudden-death stroke that had nearly erased me.
Maxim moved anyway.
Not a dodge.
A step forward.
He placed himself under the line's path like a man placing his neck under a blade.
He raised his weapon.
The needle-line struck.
SSSSHHHK.
For an instant, the world split.
Light vanished along a razor-thin plane.
The sound arrived late, slicing air and stone.
Maxim's weapon screamed as it met the line. Metal glowed, then warped. The line clipped his shoulder and took part of his armor with it.
Maxim did not fall.
He staggered.
He stayed upright.
His breath came out in a hard grunt.
He looked at me.
And then he smiled.
Not Zeus's grin.
Not a god's teasing smile.
A veteran's smile, thin and ugly and honest.
"A young one," he said, voice rough, "does not learn hope from a clean victory."
He turned back to the dragon, weapon lowering into stance again.
"They learn from watching the old refuse to die quietly."
The Empress stepped closer, blade angled.
Her voice was calm, but it carried weight.
"Alfia," she said.
I looked at her.
Her eyes were sharp. Her posture was still perfect.
But I could see it now. The micro tremor in her fingers. The tiny delay in her breathing. Even she was paying.
"You and Zald," she said. "You are not the peak of this era."
A cruel sentence.
A true one.
"You are what remains after the peak burns," she continued. "So you will live. Even if living is uglier than dying."
My calm mask cracked for half a heartbeat.
Living.
Meteria.
The sickroom.
The promise I had never spoken.
I wanted to reject it.
I wanted to tell her there was no point.
But the battlefield did not accept ideology.
Only decisions.
A veteran beside the Empress, blood dripping from his elbow, gave a small laugh.
"Listen to her," he muttered. "We are too old for epics. You two can carry what is left."
Another veteran nodded once, silent approval.
They understood the same thing Maxim did.
The dragon was choosing.
So the only answer was to choose back.
The dragon lunged again, this time not at a veteran, not at Maxim, not at the Empress.
At me.
It wanted to cut the ember before it could be carried away.
My lungs tightened.
My body wanted to hesitate.
I refused.
Silentium Eden shimmered thinly over my skin.
I stepped sideways, using the broken ridge angle, forcing line-of-sight to shift.
The dragon's head snapped, correcting.
The needle-line grazed the ground and cut a trench of glowing glass.
SSSSHHHK.
Heat washed my ankles.
I moved again, faster than my pain wanted, and fired Satanas Verion into its jaw hinge.
GONK.
The impact forced its head to jerk.
Zald took the opening.
He surged forward like a collapsing wall, greatsword rising in a brutal arc.
WHAM.
The strike landed on the wounded seam.
The dragon's foreleg buckled.
The dragon roared, this time in anger.
GRAAAAAAGH.
The Empress struck the wing joint again, forcing the wing inward, preventing flight for another heartbeat.
Maxim stepped in and drove his weapon into the neck overlap where scales had been torn away.
KADOOM.
Black blood poured again.
For a moment, we had tempo.
For a moment, the peak returned.
Then the dragon did something worse than power.
It stopped attacking.
It lifted its head and looked past us, toward the empty lanes, the scattered ash, the places where the younger adventurers had died.
And in that look was a message.
It could do this forever.
We could not.
The despair was untamed. It rose from the ground like smoke and tried to enter our mouths.
I felt it press against my ribs, against my throat, against the crack inside me where Meteria lived.
I almost let it in.
Then Maxim's voice snapped again.
"Alfia!"
I looked.
He did not point at the dragon.
He pointed at a broken corridor between ridges, a narrow lane that still existed because the dragon had not bothered to erase it yet.
An exit.
A chance.
The Empress's stance shifted.
She stepped forward, taking the dragon's gaze deliberately, blade lifted.
"Go," she said, not shouting. She did not need to.
The veterans moved with her.
They tightened around Maxim and the Empress, not as protection for them, but as weight to hold the dragon's attention.
They were choosing.
They were spending themselves.
Zald's jaw clenched. Black blood still stained his mouth.
He looked at me once.
No speech.
No vow.
Just the blunt understanding that if we stayed, everything ended here.
I hated it.
I hated living while others died.
I hated that the world demanded we make these choices.
But I was tired of pretending hatred changed physics.
I took one step back toward the corridor.
Then another.
My lungs burned. My side screamed. My legs threatened to lock again.
Behind us, Maxim and the Empress attacked in unison, the last true coordination of the strongest age.
Steel struck.
Shockwaves rang.
Black blood hissed.
The dragon roared and turned on them, furious that its prey had begun to slip away.
A veteran laughed, loud and cracked, as if daring the dragon to chase him.
Then the laughter cut off.
A crunch.
A wet thud.
We kept moving.
Because they had told us to.
Because Meteria still waited for a story.
Because if we died here, the dragon would not even remember our names.
And as we ran through ash and broken stone, the last embers of Zeus and Hera Familia fleeing a battlefield that had become a grave, I realized something with cold clarity.
The strongest Familias did not end because they were weak.
They ended because the world's calamity finally decided to prove what "calamity" meant.
We ran through a corridor that was not meant to be a corridor.
It was a wound in the battlefield that happened to still be open. A place the dragon had not bothered to erase because it assumed nothing important could escape.
That assumption was the only mercy it offered.
Ash swirled around our ankles with every step. The ground alternated between cracked glass and raw stone, each footfall uncertain. My lungs scraped on every breath. The burn on my side pulled tight, sticky and hot, as if my skin had become an ill-fitted bandage.
Zald ran ahead of me by half a body length, not because he was faster, but because his weight made his path more direct. His armor clanked with a dull, exhausted rhythm. Clunk. Clunk. Black blood still stained his mouth, and his breath came out like a furnace struggling for air.
Behind us, the basin was still screaming.
Not with voices.
With impacts.
Steel meeting scale. Shockwaves tearing stone. A roar that continued to press against the ribs even when it faded from hearing.
Somewhere in that sound, Maxim and the Empress were spending their lives.
Not for victory.
For a window.
For one last transmission of stubbornness to the future.
A horn sounded behind us, but it was not a signal anymore. It was a note torn from a throat that refused to go silent. BWOOO.
Then it cut off.
No second blast.
No cadence.
Just absence.
I did not slow. If I slowed, their choice became useless.
If I slowed, I would die with them, and Meteria would die alone.
The thought was not heroic. It was ugly, selfish, and real.
My leg locked for half a heartbeat.
Paralysis, cold as winter water, bit into the muscles and tried to fold me.
I stumbled.
Zald's hand shot back without looking and caught my wrist, yanking me forward before the ground could.
"Do not die here," he rumbled.
I did not answer. Speaking would turn into coughing.
We pushed onward into the jagged hills beyond the basin. The air here was less hot, but it still smelled wrong, like scorched iron and something ancient that did not belong on the surface.
Then the dragon's shadow rolled over us.
The One Eyed Black Dragon had followed.
Not flying.
Walking.
It did not need wings to catch prey that had already bled itself dry.
Each step landed like a verdict. THUM. THUM.
Rocks jumped. Dust rose. My teeth hurt with each vibration.
Zald cursed under his breath, low and raw. "It wants to watch us run."
He was correct.
The dragon was not rushing. It was applying pressure like a hand closing around a throat.
Psychological. Deliberate. A last resort that did not come from desperation, but from certainty.
It knew we had no supporters. No healers. No supply lanes.
We were two embers with no fuel.
It wanted to snuff us slowly.
We reached a narrow pass between two shattered ridges. The stone walls rose high enough to block line-of-sight for a moment, but not high enough to protect us from a wing beat or an eruption.
Still, it forced angles. Angles mattered.
Zald stopped and turned.
I stopped beside him, half a step behind, because my lungs needed the fraction of cover to keep working.
The dragon's single eye appeared at the end of the pass.
It did not charge.
It lowered its head, watching us like a hunter watching exhausted prey decide whether to fight or collapse.
I tasted blood and ash together.
My hands shook. I made them still.
Silentium Eden shimmered thinly over my skin. The seal felt frayed, less like armor and more like a stubborn thought I refused to release.
Zald lifted his greatsword. His stance was wider now. He looked heavier than before, the result of whatever his body had done after consuming that scale and blood. It gave him density, but it did not give him time.
His voice was quiet, almost calm. "It cornered us."
"Yes."
He breathed out. "Then we make it pay again."
I raised my hand, not high, not dramatic. My fingers were stiff. My mind was sharper than my body deserved.
Satanas Verion would still land. It was simple. It was blunt. It was honest.
But honest did not mean enough.
The dragon's head tilted.
Then it moved.
A needle-line of darkness snapped forward, not toward my chest, not toward Zald's head.
Toward the gap between us.
It was cutting our spacing. Forcing us to split, to lose coordination, to choose who lived.
The line hissed as it carved the air. SSSSHHHK.
I stepped left.
Zald stepped right.
The line sliced between us and bit into the ridge wall, leaving a glowing cut that dripped molten stone.
We were separated.
The dragon exhaled again, building a second line to finish what the first started.
Zald lunged forward, trying to draw the head down, trying to force a bite instead of a line.
His greatsword slammed into the dragon's jaw hinge.
WHAM.
Black blood hissed.
The dragon's head jerked, and the second line misfired into the sky, carving a scar through the clouds.
I used the opening to cast.
"Satanas Verion."
The block of sound hit the dragon's ear region.
GONK.
The impact forced its head to twist. Zald drove in again, brutish and precise.
WHAM.
For a moment, it almost felt like a fight.
Then the dragon's tail snapped into the pass.
Not a wide sweep.
A precise strike angled to crush the space I stood in.
WHIP.
I moved before the tail landed, but my leg betrayed me again. A cold stutter. A half lock.
The tail clipped the ground near my ankle and shattered stone into fragments.
CRACK.
A shard tore across my calf. Pain flared bright. Blood ran warm down my boot.
I bit down hard enough to taste fresh iron.
Zald roared and struck the tail with the flat of his blade, not to cut, to redirect.
THUNK.
The dragon's tail recoiled, irritated.
The dragon's eye narrowed.
And then it paused again.
As if to ask us how many more seconds we wanted.
In that pause, the sound from the basin finally reached us.
Not impacts.
Not roars.
A long, fading resonance like a bell dying in the distance.
Then silence.
The kind of silence that only comes when the last voices stop.
My chest tightened.
Not from the disease.
From comprehension.
Maxim and the Empress were gone, or close enough that the difference did not matter.
The strongest age was ending behind us.
Zald's shoulders lowered a fraction. Not weakness. A veteran's recognition of a final line crossed.
He spoke without looking back. "They bought us this."
"Yes."
He swallowed once. "Then we do not waste it."
The dragon inhaled.
The air pulled inward. Dust rose. It was building something larger now, an area wipe that would turn this pass into a furnace.
We had no barrier teams. No anchors. No item crates.
Just failing bodies and a narrow stone throat.
I raised my hand to cast again.
My lungs clenched.
I coughed.
Blood splattered on the cracked glass.
The cough turned into a second cough.
Then a third.
My vision swam.
For a heartbeat, I thought I would fall without the dragon needing to touch me.
Zald's voice cut through the haze. "Alfia."
I forced my breath back into place, shallow and controlled.
Inhale. Exhale.
The dragon's chest expanded further.
The moment before release stretched.
Then the sky split.
A white streak tore across the clouds, fast enough that my eyes could not track it cleanly at first. It looked like a falling star, but wrong. Too bright. Too directed. Too deliberate.
A comet.
A fireball wrapped in a sheath of flame and fractured light.
It screamed as it fell. SHRIIIIIIK.
Even the dragon paused.
Its head tilted upward, single eye widening slightly.
The comet did not slow.
It did not curve away.
It slammed directly into the dragon's crown.
The impact was not a normal explosion.
It was a rupture.
A bell-like crack rang across the world.
KRRRAAANG.
The dragon's skull snapped sideways with violence that made the pass walls shudder. Fire and dust burst outward in a halo. The shockwave hit seconds later, throwing me back into the ridge wall.
THUD.
Pain detonated through my calf. My lungs emptied in a gasp.
Zald dug his boots into the ground and barely stayed upright, greatsword planted like a stake. His armor rang. CLANG.
The dragon roared, a ragged, furious sound.
GRAAAAAAGH.
Its breath weapon, half formed, vented uselessly into the air.
The comet's flame died quickly, not because the energy was small, but because it had condensed into something else.
A dark object tumbled off the dragon's head and smashed into the basin-side rocks behind it.
BOOM.
Stone fractured. Dust rose.
And inside that dust, something glinted.
Not metal.
Crystal.
A translucent structure, elongated, as if the comet had carried a core that refused to break even when everything around it did.
The dragon staggered.
Not falling.
But forced to adjust. Forced to withdraw its head from the pass to regain balance.
That was the opening.
Zald stared at the impact site, eyes narrowed. "What is that."
I did not answer.
My skin prickled, not from heat, from a sense that did not belong to Danmachi's world.
A pressure like a page turning.
A record being opened.
Zald moved first, sprinting toward the fallen crystal core. I followed, limping, biting down on pain to keep pace.
We reached the crater edge.
The crystal lay half embedded in shattered rock, its surface smooth and cold even while the surrounding stone steamed. Fracture lines ran through it like veins.
Inside, a silhouette.
Human shaped.
Still.
Sealed.
For a moment, my mind refused to accept it. Then it accepted it and produced a terrible thought.
A child.
No.
Not a child.
A young man, perhaps. Hard to tell through crystal distortion.
His hair looked dark. His posture was slack, suspended in a way that was neither living nor dead.
I put my palm against the crystal.
Cold bit into my skin.
Then something answered.
Not a voice.
A sensation like text appearing in the back of my mind, too faint to read, but clear enough to feel.
Foreign.
Unregistered.
Zald crouched and pressed his gauntlet to the surface. "Alive?"
"I do not know," I said.
The crystal cracked under my palm, a thin line widening with a soft sound.
Crk.
The dragon's roar came again, closer.
It had recovered enough to remember us.
Zald's jaw tightened. "We take it."
"We do not know what it is."
"We do not know if we will live either," he replied, echoing a logic older than pride.
He was right.
The comet had bought time, but not safety. The dragon could still erase the crater with a single breath.
I looked into the crystal again.
The sealed figure did not move.
Yet the air around the crystal felt wrong, like magic that did not have a chant.
Not divinity.
Not spirit.
Something like an external system forcing its way into a world that did not invite it.
My calm mask returned by instinct.
If this was danger, then it was a danger that had already struck the dragon's head hard enough to make it recoil.
That alone was worth more than caution.
"Help me," I said.
Zald hooked his arms under the crystal's edges. I placed my hands at the opposite side. We lifted.
The weight was absurd.
Not heavy like stone.
Heavy like something resisting being moved.
Like the world itself tried to keep it where it fell.
Zald growled, muscles straining. I felt my calf scream. I did not let go.
We dragged it out of the crater, inch by inch.
Grrrk. Grrrk.
Behind us, the dragon's steps resumed.
THUM. THUM.
Closer.
Zald spat black-tinged saliva and adjusted his grip. "Move."
We hauled the crystal toward the narrow pass, using the ridge walls as line-of-sight breaks. The crystal scraped over rock, leaving faint, shimmering scuffs in its wake, like the stone was being rewritten where it touched.
I did not have time to wonder.
We reached the pass.
The dragon's head appeared at the far end again, eye burning with rage.
It had been struck, and it wanted the source.
It wanted the thing we carried.
It inhaled.
Air pulled inward.
Dust streamed toward its maw.
I raised my hand, fingers shaking.
Silentium Eden shimmered.
"Satanas Verion."
The block of sound slammed into the dragon's jaw hinge.
GONK.
It did not stop the breath weapon. It disrupted its aim.
The breath released, and the needle-line carved into the ridge wall instead of into us, slicing a glowing trench.
SSSSHHHK.
Stone melted. Heat washed over our faces.
Zald shoved the crystal forward with brutal force, and we sprinted, half dragging, half carrying, deeper into the jagged hills where the terrain narrowed and twisted.
The dragon roared behind us.
But it did not follow immediately.
For a moment, it hesitated.
Not fear.
Calculation.
It had taken damage. It had lost its tempo. It had expended a massive area attack. It was still dominant, but dominance did not mean stupidity.
That hesitation was all we needed.
...
We found the remnants of what was left by instinct.
Not a camp. Not an army.
A dying room built from broken stone and the last scraps of discipline.
A shallow cave cut into a ridge, shielded from direct line-of-sight. Inside, the air smelled of blood, soot, and potion residue.
A few survivors sat with their backs to the wall, eyes hollow. Veterans, all of them. The kind of people who had seen too much to cry loudly.
Two bodies lay at the center, placed with care.
Maxim.
The Empress.
They were alive, barely.
Not on a bed in the gentle sense.
On cloaks and folded gear, because even in endings, adventurers used what they had.
Maxim's armor had been cut and warped. One shoulder was a ruin. His breathing was shallow, but his eyes were still bright, stubborn to the last.
The Empress's cloak was gone. Her hair was singed. Her skin was pale under the soot. Yet her gaze remained sharp, fixed on the cave ceiling as if she could still measure angles.
When we entered, the veterans shifted.
Not alarmed.
Relieved, in the way people become relieved when they see a familiar face return from a place no one should survive.
Maxim's eyes found me first, then Zald, then the crystal.
His lips twitched. "You brought… baggage."
Zald snorted. "It fell out of the sky."
The Empress turned her head slightly. Her eyes narrowed at the crystal. "Not divine."
"No," I said.
"Not spirit," she added.
"No."
She exhaled once, slow. "Then it is trouble."
Maxim coughed, and the cough brought blood. He wiped it with the back of his hand as if it were an inconvenience.
"Trouble is all we ever had," he rasped. He looked at me, then at Zald. "You lived."
"We did," Zald said.
Maxim's eyes softened for half a heartbeat, then hardened again. "Good."
The Empress's voice remained level. "Where is the dragon."
"Still standing," I answered.
No one reacted with surprise.
Surprise required hope.
Maxim's gaze drifted toward the cave mouth, toward the ash-lit sky beyond. "It will not end with us."
The Empress's fingers twitched once, as if she wanted to lift her blade and could not. "It will end when the world grows someone sharp enough."
A veteran nearby gave a broken laugh. "Not in our time."
The Empress's eyes slid toward him. "Do not romanticize it. The next generation will suffer."
Maxim's expression twisted into something close to a grin. "They will suffer anyway. At least now they will have a story."
He looked at me again.
His voice lowered, rough and direct. "Alfia. Live."
I did not answer.
He continued, as if my silence was expected. "You are a weapon with too many regrets. So use the regrets. Let them keep you moving."
My throat tightened.
Not because his words were kind.
Because they were accurate.
The Empress spoke next, her tone steady, almost clinical. "You and Zald are the last embers of our houses. Embers do not fight like flames. They survive until they find fuel."
She looked at the crystal again. "That may be fuel. Or it may be poison. But it struck the dragon."
Zald's jaw clenched. "Then we carry it."
Maxim's breathing grew thinner. His gaze flickered, as if the world's edges were beginning to blur.
He chuckled once, weak. "Zeus will complain in heaven. Hera will pretend she is not proud."
The Empress closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her gaze was fixed, resolute.
"Tell them," she said, voice quiet. "Tell anyone who can listen. We did not lose because we were careless."
A pause.
"We lost because the dragon was a calamity meant to humble gods."
Maxim's eyes met mine one last time.
His voice was barely a whisper. "And because the world needed to learn that 'strongest' is not the same as 'enough.'"
His hand twitched, then stilled.
The breath that followed did not return.
The cave did not become dramatic.
There was no chorus.
Only a heavy quiet and the sound of someone swallowing grief instead of letting it spill.
The Empress stared at the ceiling for several seconds longer, as if counting.
Then she exhaled once, slow, and her gaze softened at the edges.
Her lips moved.
No sound came out, but I understood anyway.
A final order, not to us, but to the world.
'Continue.'
Her eyes closed.
Her breathing stopped.
The strongest age ended in a cave of ash and blood, not on a throne, not under banners, not with applause.
Zald bowed his head once.
Not prayer.
Acknowledgement.
The veterans around us did the same.
I remained still, because if I moved, the crack in my chest would widen and the grief would become noise.
I could not afford noise.
Not while the dragon still existed.
Not while the crystal still pulsed with foreign silence.
I turned toward the sealed figure inside the crystal.
For a moment, the fracture lines across the surface shimmered, faint and rhythmic, like something inside was trying to wake.
A sound, almost too small to hear, vibrated through the stone.
Crk… crk…
Zald stepped beside me, eyes fixed on the crystal.
"Is that the one that hit the dragon," he asked.
"I do not know," I replied.
But my hand rested on the cold surface anyway, and my mind felt that faint, unreadable pressure again.
Foreign.
Unregistered.
A record pressing against a world that did not know how to read it.
If this was poison, it had already wounded the dragon.
If this was fuel, it would burn in a way Orario had never seen.
I inhaled, shallow and controlled.
My lungs hurt.
My calf bled.
My side burned.
I was still alive.
That meant the debt had not been paid.
Outside the cave, the ash continued to fall, slow and indifferent.
Inside, the last embers of Zeus and Hera Familia gathered around a crystal that had fallen from the sky.
And in the silence that followed the end of the strongest, I realized something I did not want to admit.
The story Meteria wanted was no longer about the dragon's eye.
It was about what came after the eye decided to look away.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·